


colors of the rainbow

by exactlyemma



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Battle of New York (Marvel), Canonical Character Death, F/F, F/M, Light Angst, Minor Lincoln Campbell/Skye | Daisy Johnson, Minor Violence, Not Canon Compliant, it's the "i can only see the color of my soulmates eyes" au, its mostly fluffy i promise, its my fic and ward doesn't exist if i don't want him to, no beta we die like coulson
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-16
Updated: 2021-02-16
Packaged: 2021-03-12 01:20:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29127108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/exactlyemma/pseuds/exactlyemma
Summary: Daisy’s dad says that colors are beautiful. Beautiful not just for themselves, but for the love that they represent.“Red, for example,” he would say, running a hand down Daisy’s nightgown, “is the color of love. But I wouldn’t know what it looked like if I didn’t have your mom. If I didn’t have the love that the color represents. Because I have your mom, and because I love her, I can see red, and appreciate the vibrancy of all the colors.”Daisy would look down at her gray nightgown, wishing that the wonder in her father’s eyes was also in her own.“What is it like?” she would whisper, gripping his hand tightly.He would smile and press a kiss to her forehead. “It’s the most wonderful feeling in the world.”
Relationships: Jemma Simmons/Skye | Daisy Johnson, Phil Coulson & Skye | Daisy Johnson, Phil Coulson/Melinda May
Comments: 13
Kudos: 43





	colors of the rainbow

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> teeny tw for sexual assault and violence. coulson's battle of new york death happens but is not vividly described, the assault isn't big either, just mentioned when daisy's joking about the sad reality of being a woman in the usa, but i figured i'd warn just in case.
> 
> please excuse any grammatical errors, the first draft was a hot mess and i think i fixed most of it, but i probably missed some.

Daisy’s dad says that colors are beautiful. Beautiful not just for themselves, but for the love that they represent. 

“Red, for example,” he would say, running a hand down Daisy’s nightgown as he put her to bed, “is the color of love. But I wouldn’t know what it looked like if I didn’t have your mom. If I didn’t have the love that the color represents. Because I have your mom, and because I love her, I can see red, and appreciate the vibrancy of all the colors.”

Daisy would look down at her gray nightgown, wishing that the wonder in her father’s eyes was also in her own. 

“What is it like?” she would whisper, gripping his hand tightly.

He would smile and press a kiss to her forehead. “It’s the most wonderful feeling in the world.”

Her mom would roll her eyes, kissing Daisy’s forehead in turn. They would get to their feet and traipse out of her room, her mom flicking the switch on her wall before they shut her door. The switch that turned on her nightlight, a thing that Daisy took the time to set up each night, a device she’d made that sat at the center of her room, that shone an accurate representation of the sky at her ceiling when the lights were turned off. She would turn it each night as the earth spun. Sometimes she could point at a constellation on her ceiling and then look out her window and see it.

Her teachers called it “advanced” for a child of seven years old, to have memorized all of those stars and planets and their locations, but Daisy didn’t really understand that then. She just knew that she loved the sky, and wanted nothing more than to see them up close.

She also loved her stars because she didn’t need color to see them. They were just white and black. Her parents said they were other colors, too, but Daisy didn’t need to see them to get the concept. She didn’t need to see the color her parents called blue to appreciate the vastness of the sky. 

<>

The one color she can see, of course, is brown. Her dad says that means that her soulmate’s eyes were brown.

“That just means he--” Daisy’s mom cut him off with a signature glare.

_“Phil.”_

“They,” he corrects, “their eyes are brown, Dee. Your eyes are brown, too, so your soulmate also sees in brown.”

That's been happening more and more often lately, and Daisy, ten, looks between them, squinting. Her mom tuts and puts a hand underneath Daisy’s cheek.

“Your dad isn’t very good at being subtle, Daisy. What he’s trying to say is, whoever your soulmate is, whatever gender they identify with, it doesn’t matter to us. All that matters is that they make you happy.”

Daisy nodded slowly, absorbing and wondering why it mattered. She looked back at the pencils spread in front of her, and at the sketch pad in her lap.

“Which is blue?” she asks softly, biting her lip.

Her mom puts a finger on a darker colored pencil and sits back in her chair, watching as Daisy picks up the pencil and begins shading in the sky on her drawing.

Her parents seemed surprised when she took an interest in art. 

“Most people don’t drift towards it, they think that because they can’t see the colors their art won’t be as good,” her dad says. He omits the “people who have soulmates but have yet to kiss them” from “people”, but, back then, Daisy doesn’t really know the difference.

Daisy frowns at the wall of gray and black art supplies. “That’s stupid. You don’t try new things to be good at them.”

He sighs and ruffles her hair. “I wish more people knew that, Dee.” He takes her out for ice cream after that, telling her that the raspberry swirl ice cream she orders is white and red.

<>

One morning, Daisy wakes up in her bed and she can’t see brown anymore. She knows because the brown floors of her room are gray that morning, and she runs down the stairs in her pajamas, shouting nonsense about brown eyes and it’s gone, and it’s not until she’s crying in her dad’s lap that the new color registers.

She stills on his lap, eyes fixed on his shirt. “What color is this?” she whispers as he pats her head, touching his shoulder.

“This?” he asks, pointing at his shirt.

Daisy nods, swallowing down her tears.

“It’s blue, Dee, like the sky, remember?”

Daisy gasps. The _sky_.

She’s off her dad’s lap and races for the windows, gaping at the vibrancy of the sky. Her dad follows, placing a hand on her back as she gushes over how the whole thing is so bright and _blue_.

“What’s happening?” she concludes, looking at her dad with wide eyes.

“Your soulmate’s probably wearing colored contacts of some sort,” he explains, a twinkle in the eyes that Daisy’s seeing the real color of for the first time.

Daisy tilts her head, still looking out at the sky. “Colored contacts?”

“They’re a sort of thing people wear instead of glasses sometimes,” he explains in the patient way her dad always does. Endless patience and compassion and a look in his eyes that was reserved for Daisy and her mom. “Sometimes, though, they can change the color that your iris appears to be. If your soulmate’s wearing them right now and they’re blue, you might be seeing blue.”

Daisy mouths, “Woah,” at the thought of colored contacts, and stands on her tippy-toes to be closer to her dad’s face, making her ‘I want something’ face and putting their foreheads together. “D’you think we could get some colored contacts?”

He smirks as he leant away from Daisy’s face, putting a hand on her shoulder and leading her back to the breakfast table. “What do you say?”

“Please!” Daisy said, bouncing on her heels. “Please?”

He doesn’t say anything in response, but he opens his computer after he finishes his cereal and he lets her eat the sugary cereal she’s usually not allowed because of the blue hoops she can finally see properly. They go to the park later, only leaving when Daisy’s head begins to ache from all of the bright new blue.

The contacts come by the next week, and Daisy watches with great anticipation as her dad opens the box and shows her how to use them. She wears blue first, to properly exchange the gesture. 

She gets a blue in return the next day. She realizes when she wakes up and the floor is brown again. She reaches for the colored pencils that are waiting on her bedside table. Blue again. 

Daisy smiles, running a finger along the blue colored pencil labelled ‘sky blue’.

Daisy likes blue.

<>

She’s thirteen when she sees red for the first time. She observes it bitterly, sitting perfectly still for once and watching the news and the little camera surveillance she could get her hands on. She watches the day go by in red, the redheaded woman, the man in the red suit, the man with the red cape, the other two who don’t have red on them, and, of course, Captain America. Daisy looks down at her own Captain America t-shirt, the one her dad bought for her. She inherited her love for Captain America from him, she’s been told that many times, but she’s told it the most on that day.

That whole day is red, the red in her eyes after she cries, the red in the sunset that she watches that night without the awe she always assumed would be present, the red on her hands that she belatedly realizes is her blood once adult start rushing to her side, the red coming out of her dad on the security camera she regrets hacking into.

She didn’t mean to see it. She didn’t expect to see it. She just wanted to know what was going on. The Avengers-Initiative being brought to life together apparently wasn’t news-worthy just yet, and if Daisy wanted to be updated regularly she had to do it herself.

She slipped into the chair that was meant for her mom and dug in, scanning the screens and letting her fingers fly over the keys. It wasn’t really hacking, but Daisy liked to imagine she was a spy, sneaking around and obtaining the information for her latest assignment.

Then she pulls up the visuals for the appropriate camera just in time to see the weapon slice through her dad like… like… like nothing. Clean, smooth, no hesitation.

Red is the color of the blood splattered on the Captain America Trading Cards handed to her later that evening by Steve Rogers himself, and Daisy doesn’t need to see the color of his eyes to see the guilt on his face. She thanks him with a blank face, not crying until she’s locked back in the room at the S.H.I.E.L.D. headquarters of the week.

She cleans the cards again and again, and even though the blood is long gone, Daisy can’t look at them without her nose filling with the stench of coppery blood and having to run to the toilet to puke up whatever she had in her stomach.

Daisy hates red.

<>

Daisy’s mom is different after her dad is killed in the battle of New York. Melinda May is not the touchy feely type, Daisy has been told by many agents of lower levels, shoving her shoulder and grinning like they’ve just told a good joke instead of stating a basic fact, and Daisy smiles to appease them before turning back to her sketch pad. That was the mom Daisy knew and loved.

She’s different in the two weeks after the battle of New York. She drags Daisy to all her meetings, although they were few and very urgent to still be taking place. Daisy tunes out all of the classified information that she would usually just hear over dinner, focusing on her drawing or her laptop or her map of the sky.

Everything is white, gray, black, and brown in that time in between, as if Daisy’s soulmate can tell that she’s struggling. Daisy has always been a bit disappointed by brown. It’s what she’s seen her whole life, it’s boring. But in those two weeks, Daisy adores brown. It’s soothing. It’s old. It’s familiar. It’s the color of her mom’s eyes. It doesn’t remind Daisy horribly of her dad, as every other color does.

Red: the color of love, he would say. Vibrant. Beautiful. His wife, his love, Melinda.

Orange: his favorite fruit! Smiling clementines. Beautiful sunsets sitting next to Melinda.

Yellow: happiness. Excitement. The sun. The beach. A color rarely seen on Melinda, and he would always comment when it made an appearance.

Green: grass. The leaves of trees, the plants in the garden. Gardening with Melinda.

Blue: the sky. Leaning against him as he told her the story of whichever constellation could be seen from her window. Swimming in the ocean Daisy had never seen with Melinda.

Purple: a royal color, the history nerd in him told her; and therefore, Melinda.

Her dad never described brown to her since she could always see it, and Daisy’s never been more glad for that fact.

<>

Yellow is the color that Daisy can see a month later, moving out of the house she’s lived in her whole life to permanently move into the nearest S.H.I.E.L.D. base. Her mom says that this was always bound to happen, it was just happening a little sooner now that her dad’s gone.

Daisy watches the yellow sun in the sky as she sits in the front seat next to her mom on the drive.

<>

The Playground is underground, mostly, and Daisy doesn’t see much of the sun. There’s not many kids either, in fact she’s the only one, and living at the S.H.I.E.L.D. base gets boring quickly. At least, it would, if it weren’t for the fact that Daisy doesn’t have much of a preference of the age of who she’s socializing with and the fact that she spends more time on her computers and science than she does with other people.

<>

Maria Hill asks what Daisy’s working on when she comes to check on the data her mom is sending in from her undercover mission, probably making a rebound effort to bond now that she's down a parent. Daisy hands over her tablet without complaint, silently observing that she must be seeing red again today because she can see a bit of it on the shirt under Maria Hill’s jacket.

“This is way past high school level,” Maria Hill says, looking at Daisy, probably surprised. “How old are you?”

Daisy swallows on her dry throat. “I turned fourteen last week.” Her first birthday with neither parent present. Dad, dead, Mom, on a deep-undercover mission. She couldn’t get out for the day, but they videocalled for a long time. It ended abruptly with faint voices getting louder. She messaged later that she was fine, just had to go back undercover.

Daisy didn’t see it until the next morning.

Maria Hill grunts in acknowledgement, handing the tablet back over. “I oughta get you hooked up with Stark, he’d get a kick out of you. Or the Academy.”

“I haven’t graduated high school yet,” Daisy argues, trying not to show how intrigued she is at the mention of Tony Stark, now an Avenger despite a low recommendation for the project.

Maria Hill scoffs. “The project you’re working on would beg to differ. Give me a few days.”

Daisy gives her a few days, several of which are blue, and when Maria Hill returns to Daisy’s room after precisely a week, it’s with several college offers and a high school diploma.

“I’m fourteen,” she protests weakly, eyes fixed on the ‘Coulson’ stacked on at the end of her name.

“With an IQ higher than anyone’s business,” Maria Hill says, smirking. “Anyone on this list,” she taps her finger on the piece of paper with the colleges listed on it, “would basically kill to have you. With any luck, you’ll have two PhDs by the time you’re seventeen.”

Daisy takes the list and googled all of the schools, taking several days to assess and research, going a little deeper than google, but she omits that part when relaying her story later on.

<>

It isn’t a brown day. The brown blanket on Daisy’s bed is gray that morning, so she knows her soulmate is up to something. There’s something strange about her shirt, but she can’t put her finger down on it until she gets to the community kitchen and finds two strangers at the table, sitting and bickering over cereals and the sugar contents.

She hadn’t thought much about the shirt when she put it on that morning, but the two people went quiet and Daisy could feel their eyes on her back, reading the ‘May’ on her back. It’s one of her mom’s old work shirts, and Daisy can feel their gaze on her as she sits down near them with her own bowl of cereal.

“So you’re Melinda’s kid?”

Daisy looks up at the man, nodding through a mouth full of food.

He nods appreciatively, looking at the woman. “Toldja.”

Her eyebrows furrow, and it's only then that Daisy recognizes her. She isn’t seeing red that day, otherwise she would have seen it sooner. Natasha Romanoff, Natalia Romanova, Black Widow, an Avenger.

“You knew Coulson.”

Daisy looks down at the mention of her dad. She can almost see him in her cereal. She stirs it with her spoon. No sense in dwelling on that which has passed.

“I’m sorry,” she says eventually, her voice softer than she intended. She clears her throat. “I just… I heard about you guys a lot, I know he meant a lot to you, you meant a lot to him, too.”

The man, Hawkeye, probably, softens. “Thanks. It’s Daisy, right?”

Daisy nods, taking a bite of cereal.

“Hill was talking about you the other day. MIT, huh?”

She nods again, now hiding in her cereal out of embarrassment.

Natasha makes a knowledgeable sound. “Stark will be excited to hear about that.”

Daisy looks at her and choked on her cereal. “Your eyes,” she says once she’s recovered. “What color are they?”

Natasha informs Daisy that her eyes are green, asking no questions, and judging by the guarded look on her face, Daisy would guess that Natasha already knows why she asked.

Green. Daisy’s never seen green before. She’s still pondering on where she would go to see the best of green while she has it when an agent she’s seen around before but still can’t remember the name of appeared, telling them their presence is requested in the office of one Maria Hill.

They don’t mention much else other than, “May’s back”.

That alone is enough to have Daisy speed-walking to Maria’s office, Natasha and Clint on her heels. The agent hurries after them, shouting distant instructions Daisy doesn’t follow in her beeline for her mom’s arms. 

She bursts through the doors, launching herself into her mom for a hug that lasts longer than any physical touch her and her mom would ever have exchanged a year ago. Times had changed. 

Natasha and Clint step inside not long after, and all four of them sit down in the chairs set across the desk from Maria Hill, who’s staring at the papers on her desk and twisting her lips into a line.

“I’m sure you’re all wondering why you’ve been brought here,” she says, “especially considering the… assortment of agents.” They all glance at Daisy. “This is top secret information, and S.H.I.E.L.D. is trusting you to keep it secret for the time being.”

Daisy looks around at the silent agents. None of them speak, so she takes matters into her own hands. “What is it?”

Maria Hill nods at the agent that’s finally caught up with them, who opens another door, and out of it steps… Phil Coulson. The dead man. The man who died to bring the Avengers together. Her dad.

Daisy gets to him first, breaking down for the first time in months to be in his arms again, murmuring, “I can see green today,” into his shoulder because she can think of nothing better to say.

“Have you looked at the Hulk yet?” Is his response, and it's the first thing he says to her in months, and she laughs.

“I missed you,” she says next, choosing not to ask any of the many questions coursing through her mind.

“I can answer your questions later,” he says, because he just knows her that well. 

Daisy steps back to let May and Natasha and Clint greet him, and she spends the evening wrapped between both of her parents, and she lets herself be tucked in by them for the first time since she was seven.

“Goodnight, my high school graduate,” her dad says.

Daisy rolls her eyes. He won’t let it go that he missed it. “‘Night, love you.”

They echo the same things, and Daisy closes her eyes, no longer needing the nightlight to see the stars.

She loves green.

<>

Her first PhD is on computer science and IT, because she just can’t help herself, and her second is on genetics because one night she was doing some light reading and the next she was months deep in research.

Maria Hill is right about one thing. She’s seventeen by the time she’s finished both.

Her dad was there for both of them, and he doesn’t let her forget it. Daisy can’t complain, though. She loves having him there, especially since she got a taste of what it would be like without him. She still hates red; she still loves green.

Applying to the Academy is only second nature. It makes sense. What used to be three different schools have since been made into one big ‘you’re all S.H.I.E.L.D. agents’ school. Daisy gets in, which doesn’t surprise her. Whoever looked at her application probably accepted her the minute they got to her last name.

It’s something she’s never paid much attention to before that, but she’s a little annoyed by that thought. The thought of starting anew at the Academy while having to lug around the weight of her parents legacies on her shoulders, the expectations already set from the second her teachers read her name on their class list. 

She nearly asks for a single dorm because of it. But rooms for just one person aren’t usually readily handed out and Daisy doesn’t want to seem demanding so she just checks the box for as few roommates as possible and hopes for the best.

After all, how bad can only one person be?

<>

The world is brown on the day Daisy moves into her dorm. Her front door is brown. Her bed is brown, as is that of her assigned roommate, one Jemma Simmons. Her dad tells her that the curtains are blue before she kicks him out good naturedly, not wanting to be the kid who stays with their parents until the last possible minute.

Jemma Simmons has brown eyes. Eye color isn’t usually the first thing Daisy notices about people, but there’s something about the brown of Jemma Simmons’ eyes that catch her attention. It’s a shade that feels familiar, a shade that Daisy would feel comfortable napping in.

“Daisy? Coulson-May?” Jemma Simmons asks in a very British accent, and it's only then that Daisy realizes that she has no proof that this girl actually is Jemma Simmons other than the fact that her mind is made up.

“That’s me,” she says, getting to her feet to relieve the girl of one of her bags. “You’re Jemma I assume?”

Jemma Simmons puts down her bags by the foot of her bed with a smile. “That assumption would be correct. It’s lovely to meet you, Daisy.”

Daisy shakes the hand of Jemma Simmons with a smile.

The rest of Jemma is also strangely familiar, and not in a deja vu sense. More in the sense of Daisy knows how Jemma likes her tea before Jemma tells her. 

“How’d you know Simmons doesn’t take lemon in her tea?” the Scottish boy, Fitz, asks Daisy when she brings over a cup of tea for Jemma and a coffee for herself.

“Because lemon in tea is a punishment worthy of my demise,” Daisy says, and it's not until Jemma’s staring at her in shock that she realizes they both said it at once. She quickly takes a sip of her coffee. “Um, sorry.”

“It’s not a problem,” Jemma says, staring at her tea. “Thank you.”

Daisy smiles lamely, and the moment feels weird and awkward. Fitz snickers.

<>

The first few months at the academy are all brown. Daisy is extra careful in keeping her pencils organized in such a manner that she can tell the color without having to facetime her dad to ask. She texts him a picture of the arrangement daily both as an excuse to keep in touch and a way to make sure that she has the colors in the right order.

“What’re those?” Jemma asks on the day that marks the end of their first month. They’re both sitting on their beds, working on assignments and studying, Daisy sketching in her new pad, a going away gift from Natasha.

“Colored pencils,” Daisy says, lifting the pencil tied to a string that reads ‘purple’ and putting it to the paper. “Just organized so I can tell what color they are since I can’t see them.” Daisy realizes what she’s said and claps a hand over her mouth.

Jemma raises her eyebrows. “You’re colorblind, Daisy?” She doesn’t sound angry, or stuck up, or anything. She sounds kind of sad. Whether it’s because Jemma feels sorry for her or she’s sad Daisy didn't tell her sooner, she can’t be sure. It’s usually pity, she’d just like to think Jemma’s different.

“Not entirely,” Daisy admits, focusing on the pencil that she knows is purple but still comes out as gray. She flips to a new page and pulls out one of the few colored pencils that doesn’t need a tag. She scribbles in brown until she feels like she can breathe again, turning back to her sketch and taking a deep breath. “I can see brown.”

Jemma’s pencil freezes on her homework. “You mean…?”

Daisy doesn’t look up from her sketchpad, afraid of what she’d find in Jemma’s eyes and not quite sure why. “Uh-huh. Please don’t tell anyone. I, um, obviously kinda try and keep it on the down-low.”

“His eyes are brown?”

 _His_. Right. Daisy’s sketching hand falters. “That’s how it works, yeah.”

Jemma bristles. “I know how the soulmate process works, Daisy, I wanted to make sure.”

_Make sure a fact she already knew was correct or make sure that Daisy was straight?_

Daisy smiles as she puts down the purple colored pencil. “Ever the scientist,” she says in the bad British accent she does to annoy Jemma.

Jemma rolls her eyes, flicking one of her crumpled sticky notes at Daisy. It doesn’t make the bridge between their beds, and Daisy sticks her tongue out.

<>

The first semester passes in a blur of white, gray, black, and brown. Daisy’s soulmate wears no contacts the whole semester, and Daisy’s beginning to wonder. She has a boyfriend. His eyes are blue, or so she’s been told. He doesn’t have a soulmate. He knows she has a soulmate. They’re “just having fun”, but Daisy kind of wishes they could just be friends. She doesn’t like the feeling she gets whenever she kisses the man who isn’t her soulmate, like she’s somehow betraying a soulmate she’s never met.

Lincoln’s nice, though. He’s good to her, and everyone’s always saying that he’s “Such a sweet boy”, and that Daisy’s “lucky” to have him, so she doesn’t have the heart to tell him otherwise. There is a nice sense of distraction that Daisy gets when she’s around him. He’s attractive, Daisy knows that, and she feels its effects. She just knows it can’t last, which makes her all the more desperate to enjoy it while she has it.

Therefore, when Lincoln shows her a condom one Friday night in his dorm, she doesn’t say no. She’s already on a pill to combat her erratic menstrual cycle, why not put the birth control to its intended use?

Sex with Lincoln is fine. Daisy’s pretty sure he enjoys it more than she does, but she’s also half-convinced that that’s just how sex is supposed to be. Enjoyable for one, manageable for the other. And manage it Daisy does. 

Lincoln never forces her, either. He really is a good guy. When Daisy says she isn’t in the mood, he never pushes. He just nods and says it's okay, says it several times to drill it into Daisy’s mind that it really _is_ okay, and they laugh and cuddle and watch a movie and Daisy wants so badly to enjoy it. To be able to sit with him and not wonder if she’d have more fun with her soulmate. If sex with them were better. 

Most of all, Daisy hates when Lincoln helps her organize her art supplies, telling her the color of each item as she sorts them back into their spot. She hates the reminder that he can see colors, that he doesn’t have a soulmate, but more than that, she hates that she has to remind him that she does have a soulmate, that their relationship isn’t meant to last.

<>

It’s a blue Tuesday when Lincoln breaks up with her, the first day that isn’t brown in a long time, when he says that he’s found another girl who sees in color and doesn’t have a soulmate. It’s the first day she sees the color of his eyes, and he breaks up with her. He says he’d like to be friends still and something in Daisy feels crushed, even if that’s what she’s been wanting all along.

She smashes her colored pencils that night, savoring the feeling of the brown pencil being just another shade of gray and crushing the blue pencil most of all, crying later from all the blue dust on her hands.

Jemma comes back the next day from a brief visit to her family and finds Daisy passed out on her bed in a mess of broken pencils, and she takes Daisy's hands and cleans all the cuts and gets out the splinters and they go out to the store that same day to buy a new set. They hold hands through Daisy's bandaged fingers walking home, it’s something they’ve done before, but not in a while, not since Lincoln. Daisy missed it, she decides, walking down the street with Jemma, with no real goal other than to be there for her.

<>

The end of the second semester and by attachment the school year rolls around to a finish in early June. Parties are being held left and right, and the poor staff members have taken to locking their doors at night.

Daisy doesn’t go to many parties, instead staying inside to study for finals, or, more accurately, help Jemma study for finals. The one party she goes to and stays at isn’t really much of a party at all, if the lack of alcohol has anything to say about it. She enjoys it the most, though, sitting on her bed, sketchpad in hand with Mack, a fellow student she met in a basic engineering class, next to her, making suggestions of shitty things for her to draw while Fitzsimmons argues over the logistics of how effective a starfish army would be (“They’re so small and weak, do you have any idea how many it would take?” “Ugh, Fitz, they could form a wall! A solid wall! How do you propose to get through that?” “What are guns for, Simmons? Just bam bam and blast right through.”). If Fitz hadn’t made it clear from the beginning that he saw in colors and always had, Daisy would have assumed they were soulmates. 

A small part of her wonders why that thought makes her sad, but Daisy quickly banishes that thought to the faraway part of her brain, tuning back into the party as Mack whispers to draw a starfish army advancing on Fitz. Daisy giggles and complies, relishing Fitz’s yelling that the starfish couldn’t actually stack up like that and “it defies the basic laws of physics” and the delight on Jemma’s face.

They turn to games after that, landing on truth or dare, because it’s a party classic, and most of them are nerds, or are nerds and also Daisy, who’s lived on a S.H.I.E.L.D. base for most of her teenage life, and they collectively haven’t been to all that many parties before.

“Alright, Simmons,” Fitz says, fixing his vengeful stare on Jemma. “Truth or dare?”

Jemma finishes the last of her alcohol-free punch. “Truth.”

“Truth. Hmm.” Fitz takes his time nailing in her coffin, making a show of drumming his fingers on his chin and staring off into the sky, making Daisy and Mack laugh. “Have you ever,” he says, voice carefully enunciated in the way that everything Fitz says is, “worn colored contacts with the intention of letting your soulmate see a different color?”

That’s a good question. Answering it answers multiple questions at once. Jemma’s never mentioned having a soulmate before, much less wearing contacts for them.

Jemma bites her lip through a grin. “Yes,” she admits. “I have done that.”

Daisy sucks in a breath and Mack gives her a weird look which she hardly notices through her excitement. Because Jemma has a soulmate, too. She’s not entirely sure why it’s such an exciting revelation. Maybe because she finally has a friend who’ll understand her annoyance at not being able to see the colors. That doesn’t feel right, but Daisy can’t think of any other reason that doesn’t make her squirm in her seat.

The rest of the evening passes in a blur of drinks and laughter, and Fitz and Mack leave the dorm and Daisy has her head on her pillow when she realizes that, knowing Jemma, Jemma’s worrying herself sick about Daisy’s reaction to the revelation that Jemma has a soulmate and didn’t tell her. She finishes the last sip of her remaining punch.

“What color are their eyes?” she asks as she walks past Jemma’s bed and to her dresser, putting a hoodie on over her shirt and stripping underneath it, tossing the dirty clothes into her hamper and leaving the hoodie on as pajamas.

Jemma does indeed look pretty worried, bouncing her leg and chewing on her nails. She grins softly when Daisy asks, and lays down when Daisy does, quietly saying, “Brown,” with a smile on her face that Daisy’s never seen before.

Daisy allows herself to gasp dramatically. “Like mine!” She means it in the sense that her soulmate’s eyes are also brown, but the alarmed look on Jemma’s face reminds her that she has brown eyes, so she quickly follows it up with, “Do you have any idea who he might be?”

She shouldn’t have to remind herself that Jemma is straight as much as she does.

Jemma shakes her head and clams up after that, so Daisy gives up and goes to bed.

<>

Finals go well. Daisy had anticipated that they would, but Jemma was a ball of anxiety and nerves so hearing that she did well was a relief. The end of the semester comes hand-in-hand with sadness, though, because she probably won’t see Jemma all summer long. They exchange emails and promise to text/whatsapp, but Daisy knows it won’t be the same, and she’ll just have to wait to get her Jemma fix until the next fall.

She’ll miss those eyes.

<>

That summer is a colorful one. It seems as though her soulmate’s just woken up from a long sleep and remembered that contacts exist because every day Daisy wakes up to a new color. She goes a few days with blue, green, orange, yellow, and even a little red, though those days are harder than the rest. 

She wakes in her bed one morning, squinting at the colored pencils she keeps by her bed to inform her what color she’s seeing that day. Her eyes land on a color she hasn’t seen before, one that looks almost like red, but it isn’t, because red is gray today, so Daisy reads the label that she’s already memorized and finds pink scrawled in writing that would be brown on a normal day, but is gray, because today is a special day. Today is pink.

Daisy scrounges around and puts in a pair of green contacts, feeling a little bad that she hasn’t really worn any new colors for a while.

Her dad grins when she walks into the base’s kitchen and sees her eyes. “Trying something new today?”

“I can see pink today,” she says with a shrug, pouring out her own bowl of cereal and sitting down beside him. 

His eyes go wide. “Oh. Well, that’s exciting.”

“It is,” Daisy agrees. “So, green.”

“Green,” her dad repeats, watching her eat with a smile.

She doesn’t bother asking where her mom is. Melinda has a strict morning routine and right now she’s probably in the shower, having finished her morning run and tai chi. Daisy holds her dad’s hand, observing the pink undertones in his pale skin, in wonder that they’ve been there all along.

She’s reminded once again of the sad reality that her art is. She can’t understand the full sense of pride in her parents eyes when she shows them a finished piece. She never knew that skin could look like that. How could she have known?

Daisy messages Jemma that evening along with a brand new sketch of a pair of pink-undertoned hands, craving a form of validation that doesn’t include “I love when the color--” or “The color scheme--”. No colors. Nothing with color. Just the black and white. 

Jemma delivers, responding, “Ooohhh!! The detail!!! The shading!!! I love it Daisy :)”. Daisy sends her thanks and informs Jemma that her soulmate wore contacts today. “Funny,” Jemma says, but refuses to elaborate but to mention that her soulmate also wore contacts.

Daisy cries herself to sleep that night. She’s done it before, but she’s never done it this loud. She’s never done it feeling so miserable and simultaneously wishing that someone will hear and come to check on her.

Her mom finds her first, and all Daisy does to explain herself is shove the drawing of the hands into her.

“Daisy?” she asks, never the most sure what to do when it comes to emotions, and Daisy looks up, speaking through her sobs.

“I want to see them.”

Her mom sighs, sitting down on Daisy’s bed and wrapping an arm around her shoulder. “You can see them, Daisy. It’s… you… you can’t see all of them, no, and you can’t see them all at once, but your soulmate wears contacts for you. That means they care.”

“I don’t care if they care,” Daisy says, allowing herself to be coddled, “I want to see the colors, Mom.”

“How about we try something?” Her voice is calmer than before, and Daisy is intrigued. She stops crying long enough to sniffle.

“Like what?”

“You can’t see all the colors at once, right?” 

Daisy shakes her head, unsure of where her mom is going with this.

“But you’ve seen most of them at one point, right?”

Daisy nods.

“Seeing in color is the only sense you can’t live to the fullest right now, so why not put some of the others to use? What smell do you associate with orange?”

“Oranges,” Daisy says, her voice small. “Clementines, and making smiles with them.”

“Good,” her mom says, stroking Daisy’s hair. “How about yellow?”

“Flowers. In the garden. At our old house.”

Her mom hums at that one. “Green?”

Fresh-cut grass. Watching pine trees being dragged into the house and leaving spiky presents all over the floor, following with a broom to sweep the intruders up before someone got a splinter.

Next her mom asks about blue. Daisy thinks about the trip to the ocean they finally took last year before she went off to the academy, about the blue of the ocean that was so much different than what she’d always imagined. She’d only ever seen anything that big before when it was the sky, and the two colors were so different. It had inspired several drawings, all done when Daisy could only see brown, leaving her parents to assure her that the blue was very accurate to the ocean’s shade. She gives an abridged version of that, simply saying the ocean and the freshness and the salt in the air.

That one makes her mom smile.

Daisy’s breathing is returning to a normal pace when her mom asks about purple, her tears drying on her face as Daisy delves into her memories of purple lilacs and grape juice.

White she associates with the smell of snow, with the bitterness in the air before a blizzard.

For black she names the smell of a campfire. The black of the ashes on her fingers when she tries sketching on a rock with the charcoal. The lovely smoke that clings to her clothes for days afterwards.

For gray she names vanilla.

Daisy’s mom hesitates after, and Daisy knows exactly why.

“Do you want to do red?” she asks eventually, leaving the choice up to Daisy.

She sighs. “Yeah.”

“Alright. What smell do you associate with red?”

Daisy speaks around the growing lump in her throat. “Blood.”

The thought of it doesn’t send her running to the toilet anymore, but that doesn’t mean she has to like it. Her mom rubs her back.

“Can you think of anything else?”

Eventually Daisy comes up with strawberries, and while she does like strawberries, they still aren’t the first thing she thinks of when she thinks of the color. Strawberries are a nicer thing to think about, though, and a lot more relaxing. She doesn’t associate strawberries with death, so they’ve got at least one thing going for them.

“How about brown?” Her mom says next. “Chocolate, since you said vanilla for gray?”

“No,” is Daisy’s immediate response.

She isn’t quite sure why she says no to it, chocolate is most often brown, and it's a perfectly good thing to associate with brown, unlike red and blood. Then she breathes in through her nose to be assaulted with the lavender smell of Jemma’s shampoo, and she realizes why brown can’t be chocolate.

“Brown can’t be chocolate,” Daisy says, sitting up and away from her mom’s arms. “It can’t be chocolate, because brown’s my roommate. At the academy. She’s got brown hair, and brown eyes and when you said it just now I…” Daisy trails off, chewing on her bottom lip and hesitating to reveal what could possibly be incriminating evidence, though Daisy isn’t even sure what the crime she’s committed is. “I could smell her hair product.”

Her mom raises an eyebrow. “Oh?”

Daisy nods, trying to play it cool. “Yeah. Brown is Jemma.”

“Jemma,” her mom repeats, and Daisy isn’t sure why hearing the name coming out of her mom’s lips makes her feel weak at the knees.

Her mom leaves soon after, and Daisy’s thankful to no longer have to hide her distress, turning to her sketchpad with twitching fingers. When she’s done it’s close to four in the morning, and Daisy hasn’t moved. Her limbs are sore from the uncomfortable position, and her hands are shaking, no longer from the need to draw, but from caffeine. She lays back on her bed, flexing her fingers and staring at her ceiling, ridden with various star maps and planet systems. 

She opens the sketchpad, pointedly not looking at the drawing she’s finished. She tears out the page, savoring the sound of the paper splitting away from its seams. She stares at the drawing for a moment, absorbing the detailed face of Jemma Simmons, then places it face down on her bed, leaning to open the bottom drawer of her dresser and unceremoniously dropping the sketch in with the rest.

The drawer has gotten annoyingly full over the past month away from Jemma, and Daisy’s looking forward to the start of the school year, if only to get all the wretched things out of her hands, the many drawings she’s made of Jemma are starting to get out of hand.

Daisy’s used brown for all of them. Something about the color is simply Jemma, and she can’t get it out of her head. 

She feels a little sorry for ever thinking that brown could be boring when the color is so very Jemma and nothing about Jemma Simmons is boring. She doesn’t have a boring bone in her little nerd body.

<>

The summer ends and the flurry of colored contacts promptly ends, but Daisy doesn’t really have it in her to complain. Not when she’s seeing Jemma again. She’d miss seeing the color in Jemma’s eyes, so it’s probably for the best.

Jemma arrives after Daisy again, and finds Daisy sketching on her bed. She drops her bags onto her bed with a sigh. Hugs and greetings are exchanged, and then they sit on their beds, each facing each other and afraid to ask the question they both know they’re thinking about.

“Is the world still gray?” Jemma eventually asks, picking at her nails and avoiding Daisy’s eyes.

Daisy looks at the ceiling and tries to imagine the solar system on it. “And brown.”

Jemma smiles and looks Daisy in the eye for the first time. “Me, too.”

And Daisy feels relieved for some inexplicable reason. 

They meet back up with Fitz and Mack on campus for dinner that night, and Daisy remembers why she missed them all summer, as they fall back onto stupid arguments and banter.

The first week of classes ends by the time Daisy remembers the brown paper bag shoved down to the bottom of her duffel bag. Classes were kicking into gear and loading homework down, and Daisy only finds it because she needs to find a ruler that measures centimeters.

The bag of Jemma sketches.

Jemma bustles into their dorm not a moment later, arms full of books and talking endlessly about a new project she’s working on with Fitz. Something about a chemical that knocks out the victim without leaving a lasting wound.

“He wants to call it a night-night gun,” Jemma says, scoffing even as she recalls it.

“Hey, Jemma?”

She looks up from her books with a questioning smile. “Hello, Daisy. Is your day going well?”

Daisy looks down at the extensive pile of sketches, lips pursed. “It could be better.” She pushes onward without turning around to see the sad look she just knows is on Jemma’s face right now. “Um, listen, I have something for you, and this is going to seem weird, but I promise I didn’t intend for it to turn out this way. Promise you won’t get weirded out?”

“Daisy, you’re scaring me.”

She picks up the bag and shoves it into Jemma’s arms. “Here. I can’t watch.”

She turns away, only able to hear the soft crinkling of paper as Jemma opens the bag, and then a soft, “Oh,” as she finds the contents. “Daisy, it’s beautiful,” she says, her voice gentle. “Why would I be weirded out? It’s lovely.”

Daisy begins tapping her foot on the ground, face hidden in her arms. “Keep going.”

She can practically hear the confused furrow in Jemma’s brow as she says, “Alright,” and takes out the second sketch. And the third. And the fourth. And the fifth. And th--Daisy peeks between her fingers at Jemma’s face, trying to gauge her reaction, if she needs to make a break for it or not.

She’s surprised to find a smile on Jemma’s face, even as she examines the tenth drawing.

Either Jemma’s very good at hiding her emotions, or she actually isn’t weirded out by receiving a bag with many drawings of her face. Hell, Daisy would probably be uncomfortable in her situation.

“You’re not… grossed out?” 

“Why would I be grossed out?” Jemma asks, turning her pretty gaze on Daisy. “They’re all beautiful. This one, though.” She taps a finger on the sketch in her hand, something near the fifteenth. “Gray. The rest were all brown.”

“Oh, right, that one.” Daisy feels like she’s divulging weirdly personal information, but she also feels weirdly like Jemma should already know it. “Um, my soulmate was wearing colored contacts the day I made that one. Blue.”

“Blue,” Jemma repeats, staring at the drawing again. “I’ll have to remember that for a blue day.”

Daisy tilts her head at those words. “You remember days by colors?”

“Oh, um, it’s silly, I know,” Jemma says, skin flushing gray in a blush as she puts down the sketch in a pile with the rest, moving onto the sixteenth.

“No, no, it’s not silly. I do that too, actually. I always thought I was the only one, but I guess not.”

Jemma smiles when Daisy says that, and it’s a dazzling thing. “Is your favorite color green?”

Daisy nods, smiling at her sheets. “Green is the color I could see the day I found out my dad wasn’t dead.”

Jemma nods, solemn. “Brown’s my favorite.”

“Brown?” Daisy asks. “You don’t get bored of it?”

“Never,” Jemma protests, looking offended Daisy had to ask. “I used, to, sometimes, but now I think of it as a reminder, that they’re out there somewhere. They’re real, I just have to meet them.” She shrugs. “And kiss them.”

Daisy laughs at the finish, shook to her core by Jemma’s phrasing. “They?”

Jemma looks so struck that Daisy wants to take it back.

“Listen, I’m sorry, you don’t have to talk about it if you’re not comfortable--”

“--No, I can talk about it.” Jemma smiles, only it doesn’t look real, and she drops it almost immediately. “I owe you a bit of an answer.”

“You don’t owe me anything.”

“Except for the money you spent on that brown colored pencil and all those sheets of paper.”

It doesn’t come out like Jemma intended it as a joke but Daisy laughs anyway, if only for the sake of the smile that comes hand-in-hand with laughter.

“Maybe. My point is, Jem, that you don’t have to talk about it if you’re not ready.”

“No, I’m ready.” Jemma sighs. “It’s just an awkward conversation. I don’t think I really have a preference. Between genders, that is.” She shrugs, and Daisy smiles at the normalcy of it.

“I’ve never put a label on my sexuality either,” she admits, ignoring what could be a spark of hope in Jemma’s eyes so that her imagination doesn’t run wild with what probably isn’t there to begin with. “Definitely not straight. Probably not gay. Something in between, I guess.”

Jemma drums her fingers against her bedspread. “I hate not having a proper label. I’m a scientist, and I want everything to fit into its nice little box, but this just… doesn’t.”

“And that’s okay.”

Jemma looks at the floor. “I know. I know, and I’m getting used to it, I’m figuring stuff out, but… it would be easier if I had a name for who I love, if only to let the pretty girl in my morphology class know that I’m _not_ straight and I _am_ interested.”

Daisy laughs, unsure of why she feels a stab in her chest at Jemma’s joke.

She feels strange in the days following her conversation with Jemma. It’s as if now that she knows she has a chance at all with Jemma she’s trying to be appealing, and it’s confusing. She hadn’t realized she wanted a chance with Jemma. She’s still a little afraid of thinking about that, especially when there’s probably so many other better people who could belong to Jemma. Who would be better for her. Really, it’s for Jemma’s benefit that she stays away.

She’s just leaving her ‘advanced martial arts’ class when her phone rings, the contact on the phone that of her mom. Daisy answers immediately, heart pounding in her chest. Melinda May despises phone calls. She rarely uses them even to text, a phone call warrants a state of emergency. Daisy answers as such.

“What’s wrong?”

_“Daisy?”_

She sits down on a bench, hurriedly bouncing her foot on the ground. “Mom, what’s wrong?”

_“Nothing’s wrong.”_

“Oh.” Daisy’s leg bounces slower. “Then… why are you calling?”

There’s a pause on the other end of the line. _“I wanted to talk to you. About… about colors.”_

Daisy raises a playfully suspicious eyebrow. “Who are you and what did you do to my mom?”

She can cleanly picture the carefully practiced eye roll. _“It’s about what you said. When we were doing that exercise. Associating colors with smells, and all that.”_

“Okay?”

_“I did it with my mom, too, when I was young and desperate.”_

“Okay.”

_“I started doing it when I was still a teenager. I could see blue.”_

Daisy smirks. “Duh.”

_“Don’t make me regret making this phone call.”_

Daisy presses her lips shut.

_“It was the sky for a long time. I didn’t put a smell to it, I didn’t need to. I could see it all the time. Colored contacts weren’t really a thing our generation benefited from. All I had was the sky.”_

She pauses, but Daisy doesn’t utter a word. One warning was warning enough, this is more about her mother’s life than she’s ever heard in one sitting before, she’s not going to blow it with her dreadfully splendid sense of humor.

_“Then I met this guy at work.”_

Daisy can’t quite hold back her snort, one her mom probably hears but thankfully disregards. 

_“You know by now, that his name was Phil Coulson. And he had these eyes. They were so blue. I’d seen blue eyes before, but I’d never been drawn to them like that before. And the next time I got desperate, the next time I went down the list… blue wasn’t the sky anomore. It was a smell this time. I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what it was.”_

Daisy waits with bated breath as her mom pauses.

_“It took me five years into our marriage to realize the scent was his cologne.”_

Daisy sucks in a breath. Oh, shit.

Her mom doesn’t connect the line, but she doesn’t need to, Daisy’s brain is already running at eighty miles an hour trying to work it out. Not that she doesn’t already know what her mom’s implying. She’s trying to work out an excuse. Get around it. Get around the obstacle. Yes, that’s what this is. A temporary obstacle.

“Listen, Mom, it’s… we’re not like that.”

 _“I’m not saying you are.”_ Maybe she isn’t, but her words and stupid logic are. _“You deserved to know.”_

Daisy lets her coping mechanisms get the better of her. “Thinkin’ about those sexy blue eyes?”

_“Smelling that delicious brown hair?”_

That sobers her up nicely. “Bye, Mom.”

She can hear her mother’s smirk through the phone. _“Bye, Daisy.”_

She sits on that bench for another two hours, bouncing her leg at record speed and sketching when the tapping of her fingers on the cool bench gets to be too much to bear. She sits on that bench until it gets too dark to sketch, and even if there’s a light near the bench, she isn’t trying to get raped while she’s working through the mental shit that is her mind right now.

The first thing she’s hit with when she walks into the dorm is the scent she kind of wants to hate, the scent that makes her shoulders fall from their tense position, that has her sighing wistfully as she plops down onto her bed, sketchpad pointedly face down.

“Hey, Dee,” Jemma says absentmindedly, eyes on her paper. “Good classes?”

Daisy blinks, thinking back to three hours ago. She shrugs. “Yeah, fine. Hand’s working us hard, though, I should shower. I smell like shit.”

Jemma looks up for the first time, giving Daisy her trademarked bright smile. “I think you smell lovely. I won’t stop you, though. It’s good to see you.” Her smile turns a little sad at the last sentence, and Daisy quickly turns away to grab fresh clothes from her drawer unprepared for the sudden reminder that she’s been out more lately and she’s been avoiding Jemma a little, but it’s only because she’s beautiful, and every time she smiles Daisy wants to kiss it right off her lips, but that’s something she can’t have. It’s something she doesn’t deserve. And if Jemma sets one single set of puppy-eyes on her she’s going to snap and spill everything, and goodness knows the last thing Jemma needs is to be handling Daisy’s fragile heart.

It seems she’s having enough trouble with her own, Daisy wouldn’t want to be a burden.

She gets all the way to the door to the bathroom when Jemma speaks.

“Have I done something?”

Daisy looks at the floor. “No. God, no, Jemma. It’s… it’s all me. I’m… working through some shit.”

Daisy dares to glance at Jemma, who nods, eyebrows furrowed together. Her eyes find Daisy, dark and sad. “Do you think you could try to work through it a bit faster? I miss you.”

She swallows. “I’ll try.”

Jemma smiles, not quite the familiar happy look. A little sadder, perhaps optimistic. “That’s all I could ever ask of you.”

Daisy cries in the shower that night. It’s the first time in a long time that she’s let it all out, probably the first time since the night her mom sat with her and went down the colors and linked them to scents, and it feels kind of nice, letting the hot tears stream down her cheeks when she knows any marks they would leave will be covered by the steaming water. The only thing she really has to manage is her volume, she knows Jemma will catch on quickly, what with her decent hearing and a brain that seems to be trained to know whenever Daisy’s having a bad day.

She cries about Jemma, she cries about the black, gray, white, black, and brown world around her. She cries about the smell that’s swirling around the room and sticking to her nostrils, the smell that’s inherently brown and inherently Jemma. The smell that she associates with the color of her soulmate's eyes, just as her own mom associated the smell of her own soulmate with his eye color. 

She wonders if it’s possible for one person to find their soulmate, only to find that their soulmate doesn’t belong to them. She’s Jemma’s soulmate, but Jemma isn’t hers. One-sided. Would it be better, or worse than this?

Either way, she’s totally fucked.

She does try to get over Jemma, though, if hanging out in their room more and ignoring her less counts. Jemma seems to smile more, or maybe Daisy’s just there to see it more, but, either way, she’s sure that the flutter in her stomach hasn’t gone away yet, so she has some more work to do. How, exactly, to stop crushing on someone, she doesn’t know. She’s sure trying hard, though.

<>

In the second semester, they have a class together. An elective-type thing that they selected the year before, lounging in their room and wondering which classes would be the easiest to pass. They’d landed on ‘Introduction to Mechanics’, something neither of them were familiar with, much to the disgust of Mack, their resident mechanic. Their names weren’t near one another in the alphabet, and as such, their assigned seats were across the room from one another.

There was an ice-breaker written on the board, a rather non-inclusive ice-breaker, Daisy thought, for a world in which people who couldn’t answer it existed, asking what their favorite color was.

Being near the beginning of the alphabet, Daisy went before Jemma. She answered truthfully, though her answer was a new truth.

“Brown.”

She caught some wrinkled noses, but the smile that lit up on Jemma’s face was the only one Daisy took to heart. She smiled at her legs, looking down as the kid next to her declared that his favorite color was rainbow. 

“Brown, huh?” she asks as they leave the room ninety minutes later, hip checking Daisy gently through an armful of books.

“It grew on me,” she says with a shrug, omitting the part of her answer that has to do with Jemma and how wonderful she smells.

“Your soulmate’s growing on you, maybe.”

Jemma’s tone is teasing, but it bites nonetheless. Daisy smiles through the pang in her heart.

_I wish._

Introduction to mechanics turns out to be a manageable class. Daisy sometimes pesters Mack for answers to homework, much to the horror of Jemma, who is of the belief that cheating on homework is bad.

“It’s not bad, Jems, we’re university students, it’s basically necessary,” Daisy says, pausing in her attempts to charm Mack into telling her the difference between different screwdrivers. The cafe they’re studying/hanging out in is on campus, and its packed with other students.

“You do homework to practice for class! You’re not learning when you cheat!” Jemma protests, beginning to get gray in the face. Fitz sits next to her, computer in his lap, typing like a madman and muttering to himself.

“Princess Jemma,” Daisy teases, putting on her bad British accent just to see Jemma wrinkle her nose in distaste.

Fitz is, surprisingly, on Jemma’s side for once in a debate. To be fair, though, their debates usually stay between them, and Mack and Daisy watch and eat popcorn, occasionally take notes.

“It’s supposed to help you remember, Daisy,” he pipes in, looking up from his screen, “you’re not going to remember if you ask Mack.”

Jemma sighs, turning to Fitz. “ _Thank_ you!”

Mack squints at them, then turns and whispers the answer to Daisy, who pumps her fist and scribbles down the words before she forgets, clapping Mack on the back.

Jemma scoffs, turning over her own sheet and frowning at the paper.

Daisy finishes after buying Mack a coffee for the rest of the answers, walking home smugly with Jemma, who keeps up with her act of being frustrated all the way up until they reach their dorm building. Jemma checks her mailbox out of habit, and finds a box. She gasps when she reads the labelling, turning to Daisy with a grin. 

“They came!”

Daisy blinks at her. “What came?”

“Come on, we’ve got to go.” Jemma grabs her hand, hurrying down the hallway to their room, package clutched in her other hand. 

Daisy can’t get it out of her what’s in the package all the way to their dorm, she’s just giggling and shaking her head. Jemma swipes her student ID across the handle and it clicks open, and Daisy sits on her bed impatiently as Jemma opens the package.

“What is it?” Daisy asks once again, and Jemma grins as she pulls the box out of it’s packaging. Daisy leans forward to get a glimpse of the words on it, laughing as Jemma hands it over.

Colored contacts. Ha.

“What are these for?” she asks, even as she flips the box over and begins to read the information printed on the back.

Jemma shrugs, biting back a smile. “I thought we could have some fun.”

“We absolutely can, it’s just out of the blue.” Daisy pauses to wonder if she should technically be saying “out of the gray”, but catches herself getting distracted and shuts her mouth in recovery. “No special occasion?”

“I missed you. You’re back, and I wanted to celebrate.”

“I never left, Jemma.” Spring break isn’t even until next month.

“But you did, Dee,” Jemma says softly. “I don’t know where you went, but it was far away.” She blinks, and her smile returns. “But you’re back now, and I don’t know what you did, but I missed seeing you, so I wanted to spend time with you. Unless you don’t want to?”

“No, no, it’ll be fun,” Daisy says, handing the box back over. “You go first.”

“Poisoned, are they?” Jemma asks, grinning as she opens up the box.

“You’ll just have to open them and find out.”

Jemma walks over to the bathroom, disappearing behind the door to use the mirror, talking as she goes. “Is this revenge for not giving you the answers to that homework assignment?”

Daisy walks to the bathroom to be closer to her, leaning on the doorway and watching Jemma lean over the counter, eyes open wide. “You know what you did.”

Jemma pauses to turn and give Daisy a smile. “Ominous, I like it.”

She falls silent to let Jemma focus and get the contact in, applauding when she turns to show off her work, one eye blue, and the other still brown. 

“Lovely,” she says, then frowns, because she never used to say that. Jemma must be rubbing off on her. Jemma doesn’t notice, turning back to the mirror and picking up the other contact, leaning back over the counter in preparation. 

Daisy doesn’t even notice the shift. Not until Jemma manages to get in the second contact, and her hair turns gray. That’s when her eyes catch on the blue towel on their rack. 

That’s when she notices the shift.

“Shit.”

Jemma turns to her wearing a concerned expression. “Daisy? What’s wrong?”

Daisy clutches the doorway now, it's the only thing keeping her upright until Jemma wraps an arm around her side and drags her to the toilet, bringing her closer to the towel. Daisy reaches out and touches it, feeling the thinning threads of the towel under her fingers. The blue threads of the towel.

“Your eyes,” she whispers, not daring to look up again lest it still be there.

“Oh, that’s right, silly me, they’ll be gray now, Dee. I suppose I figured you’d know that already, but it’s alright.”

Jemma’s voice is so soft and kind. She really means well.

Daisy swallows. Jemma’s hand is still on her back. She looks up and looks Jemma in the eyes again. Exhales at the sight. Still blue.

“Jemma,” she begins, her voice shaking. “Uh. They’re not gray.”

“What?” Jemma tilts her head, something she does when she’s confused. “Daisy, don’t be ridiculous, you’ve told me that you see brown--”

“I can see the blue,” Daisy blurts, and Jemma’s words die on her lips. She sits down on the edge of the tub.

“Oh.”

Daisy looks back at the blue towel, shoulders sagged. “Yeah. Oh.”

They sit in silence, the first silence Daisy could call awkward with Jemma. Then Jemma gets to her feet and picks up the box. Daisy’s half expecting her to tear it in half, or spit on it, or something. Instead, she turns and holds it out to Daisy.

“Shall we run an experiment?”

Daisy bites back questions, demands for further explanation. Instead, she nods, letting Jemma lead her to the mirror and hand her the box. 

After a nod from Jemma, Daisy takes out a pair of contacts. She stares at them in her hands for a moment, trying to absorb the weight of the situation. Jemma knows. She hasn’t run yet. Daisy wants to cry.

She puts the first contact in, aware of Jemma taking out her own contacts, pausing when she notices Daisy’s got one in. Daisy doesn’t even notice the blue slipping away.

“What color are they?” she asks, her voice barely a whisper.

“Um.” Daisy looks down. “Blue.”

Jemma stares at the blue towel Daisy was so fixated on, chewing on her lip. Daisy takes that as uncertain and puts in the other contact. Once finished, she turns to Jemma, eyebrows raised.

“You’ve put them both in?”

Daisy nods, and Jemma’s face falls. Daisy’s heart sinks. She can’t look at Jemma, can’t bear the look of heartbreak that mirrors the look on her own face. She wonders if she’s Jemma’s soulmate but Jemma isn’t hers, if the whole thing was an unfortunate coincidence. She got her hopes up and for nothing. 

Then Jemma’s breath catches. “You’re sure they were blue?”

Daisy stares at the sink, her stomach swirling like she might vomit. “Why?”

“What color is your toothbrush?” Jemma’s hand grips her shoulder, startling Daisy enough to look at her toothbrush, resting near the sink. 

She blinks. “Um, not blue or brown?”

“Is it green?”

Daisy looks back down at the packaging. Son of a bitch. “Okay, funny story, remember when I told you they were blue?” Jemma grips her shoulder tighter. “I think I was looking at the trash that you left on the counter--this is on _you_ \--but, they’re green, yeah.”

Jemma sighs shakily. “Holy shit.”

“Is-is the toothbrush green?”

Jemma nods gravely. They stare at each other in the mirror for a long moment. They must realize at the same time how close they are, because they both whip from facing the mirror to one another at the same time. Daisy’s eyes are a moth, and Jemma’s lips are her flame. She can’t look away.

“This is an experiment,” Jemma says, staring at Daisy. “Purely for science purposes.”

“Of course.”

“This is a very poorly planned experiment,” Jemma whispers, even as she leans forward. “If we were better prepared we’d have followed the standard ‘if, then, because’ for our hypothesis, for starters, and that’s on a high school level. What’s our independent variable?”

“Us,” Daisy says, inching closer to Jemma, eyes fixed on her lips. “Our eyes are acting up.”

“And our dependent variable?” Jemma probably already knows the answer, but she lets Daisy give it a shot anyway.

“Us five minutes ago? Before all this happened.” It’s a bad answer and Daisy knows it, but in her defense, she has good reason to be distracted. The smell of Jemma is much stronger up close, despite trying to breathe shallow, it’s swirling through her nostrils and filling her lungs. Her lips are very close. Kissably close.

Jemma grins, her forehead finally touching Daisy’s. “Control group?”

Daisy bites her lip in thought, and it;s apparently the nail in Jemma’s coffin, because she tilts her head upwards, their foreheads separating, but the sensation is quickly replaced by lips, so Daisy doesn’t mind. Because Jemma’s kissing her. She’s kissing Jemma. Their lips are moving together like this isn’t the first time they’ve done it. It’s perfect and sweet, and all the sweeter because Daisy’s been waiting so long to do it.

She closed her eyes when the kiss began, and she doesn’t open them, even when they’ve parted to catch a breath. Their hands met sometime while they were kissing, borderline making out (no, not that!), and Daisy relishes the touch, the ability to feel Jemma’s heart beating a little too fast.

It’s Jemma who speaks first, a scientist until the bitter end.

“Have you opened your eyes?”

Daisy nearly laughs. “No. You?”

“No.”

They stand in silence. Daisy can hear Jemma’s breathing. She can hear distant laughter that vanishes as its carrier passes by the hallway. The tile of the counter is cool beneath her hand. The smell of Jemma is still surrounding her, warming her like a blanket.

She takes a deep breath.

“Jemma, I’m scared.”

Jemma’s other hand piles on top of the first as she laughs shakily. “Me too, Dee.”

Daisy hesitates before asking, afraid not only of opening her eyes, but of the answer to her question. “Do you… want this?”

Jemma hesitates in answering. “Yes. I think I do want this. No. I don’t think. I do want this.” She pauses. “I want you.”

It’s all the verbal encouragement Daisy needs. She squeezes Jemma’s hand. “Count of three?”

“Deal.” Jemma squeezes her hand in return. “One.”

Daisy squeezes back. “Two.”

Jemma gives her hand a final squeeze. “Three.”

Daisy opens her eyes and immediately meets Jemma’s gaze, so it takes her a moment to realize. It takes her a moment to notice that Jemma’s face isn’t as gray as it usually is, that there’s some pink on her cheeks, that she’s wearing a green sweater for goodness’s sake. The first thing she gets lost in are Jemma’s eyes, brown once again. Familiar, soothing, perfect. 

Then Jemma gasps. Her jaw drops as she looks around their tiny, cramped, shitty, _wonderful_ bathroom. Daisy follows her gaze, blinking in surprise when it turns on her and stays. Jemma squints.

“What… what are you doing?”

Jemma looks surprised. “I’ve never seen you all the way before,” she explains. “You’re so pretty, I want to notice everything in full color.”

Daisy has to pretend that that isn’t the single most romantic thing anyone has ever said to her. “Right. Naturally.”

Jemma smirks, and then Daisy’s mesmerized by her lips, gentle and pink, and a little chapped. 

Then Jemma starts kissing her again, and Daisy gives in to the two years she’s spent being in love with Jemma Simmons and kisses back.

<>

Daisy experiences several (many) things in full color for the first time in her life that evening. Her sheets are purple, which she knew from the packaging, but it’s still a shock to her system. Most of her clothes are black. She accidentally swapped the pink and yellow colored pencils in her box and never noticed. She throws away the labels with glee. 

Most exciting is probably the sunset. It’s so colorful that the massive headache building up in her head is well worth it. That’s what Daisy says in the moment, anyway. Jemma limits herself to a minute watching the sunset, and urges Daisy to do the same.

“You’ll have them for the rest of your life, Dee,” she says, one hand on her hip, the other on the blinds.

“Please, Jems,” Daisy begs. “This is my only first, I’ll take a headache for that.”

Jemma sighs, but takes her hand off the blinds. “Take an ibuprofen?”

“Deal.” Daisy nods urgently, and takes the pill and glass of water Jemma delivers to prove her point. She takes out her pencils and draws the sunset for Jemma, taking a few dozen pictures on her phone to boot.

<>

She wakes up slowly in the morning, unused to the morning light filtering through their blinds being a soft golden instead of plain white. Her head is pounding. Jemma’s sitting up in her bed, and giggles when she notices Daisy’s awake. 

“Good morning, sleepy.”

Daisy sits up, feels the world spin, groans and falls back in bed. “Head.”

Jemma points at the table between their beds, where a glass of water and a pill are waiting. Daisy flashes Jemma a smile and takes it, laying in bed with her eyes closed until she feels human again.

She sits up, content to watch Jemma, but opens her eyes to find Jemma already watching her. There’s a paper on her lap, and Daisy looks closer to find one of the sketches she’d made. The blue one. She smiles.

“You can see it now. All of it.”

Jemma nods, her lips turning up as she looks back down at the drawing. “It’s even better now.”

“Jemma?”

She looks up, still in her pajamas, eyebrows raised expectantly. Daisy’s going to be riding her wave of euphoria for days. “I’m really happy.”

Jemma softens. “I’m really happy too, Daisy.”

Daisy’s pretty sure, for now at least, that’s enough.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if i made any mistakes in science stuff no i didn't, it's just daisy not knowing science things and jemma not having the heart to correct her. this has been a psa, thank you. chapter two will be coming at some point. not sure when, sorry. it's in the works.
> 
> this is my first work for this fandom, please be gentle and feel free to share your thoughts.
> 
> thank you for reading :)


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